Visual filling-in occurs when a retinally stabilized object undergoes perceptual fading. It is commonly believed that information about the apparently vanished object is lost and replaced solely by information arising from the surrounding...

Epilepsy is the most common neurological disorder in children, with an incidence of 100 per 100,000 children per year. Recurrent seizures during this period in life are often distressing to the individual and the family, but arguably the most...

Radio relics are extended regions of synchrotron radio emission that have been found in the outskirts of a few dozen galaxy clusters. Relics are often associated with clusters undergoing merger activity. They are not associated optically with a...

Accurate chromosome segregation in human oocytes requires that meiotic sister chromatid cohesion remain intact for decades and work in model organisms indicates that deterioration of meiotic cohesion over time may be a major determinant of...

Protein phosphorylation is an important regulatory mechanism for the control of countless processes in living systems. The delicate management of phosphate attachment to, and removal from, serine, threonine and tyrosine residues in proteins...

Gustatory pheromones regulate mating behaviors in Drosophila melanogaster and represent an important model for understanding how sensory stimuli can drive behavior. However, the genes and cells involved in pheromone detection have remained poorly...

Objective. We explored preferences and perceptions about treatment decision-making roles among persons with severe mental illness and evaluated two computer-based medication values clarification tools. Methods. In this study we conducted a pilot...

The present thesis is focused on developing a better understanding of factors driving disease biology and overall risk using cancers of the bladder and breast as model systems. As no single approach was likely to unravel the complexities of these...

Drosophila melanogaster is a model organism often used when studying the complex processes of neuronal signaling and neurodegeneration. The short life cycle, malleable genetics, amenability to in vivo electrophysiological assays and sensitivity to...

The neurophysiological examination of auditory-object representations has focused on how early auditory cortical areas code for the spectral and temporal features of auditory objects. The goals of this dissertation was to investigate how auditory...

Medical imaging methods have become increasingly important in diagnosing diseases and assisting therapeutic treatment. In particular, early detection of breast cancer is considered as a critical factor in reducing the mortality rate of women....

The studies presented in this dissertation explore several points of intersection between action perception and production within the human brain. One's ability to use perceptual information about another individual's actions to guide and inform...

Engineers have devised many techniques by which to raise the temperature of a cancer tumor 8 degrees above body temperature. Such treatment is called hyperthermia; experiments in vitro suggest it may be an effective adjunct to standard radition...

Boundary integral methods have long been used to solve boundary value problems for elliptic partial differential equations with piecewise constant coefficients, since they have several numerical advantages over conventional volume discretization....

Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular pathogen that is able to survive in a range of hosts due to its repertoire of secreted effector proteins. Utilizing the type I and type II Δku80 strains we engineered a collection of targeted knockout...

In this thesis, we present different approaches to tying knots using robots by enforcing different types of constraints. We attack the problem from three different directions; mechanical design, motion planning with simple control strategies, and...

All cells must organize their cytoplasm in order to carry out functions properly and survive in different environments, and the requirement for organization is increased in large, multinucleate cells. It has long been known that membrane-bound...

One of the most distinctive aspects of humans as a species is our propensity to form complex social networks made up of intense, non-reproductive bonds with non-kin. Navigating these networks presents a considerable cognitive challenge that is...

As the human population increases, it is imperative that we develop strategies to improve agricultural productivity to meet the growing demand for food, fuel and fiber. More than 2 billion people suffer from "hidden hunger" (a lack of essential...

Background. It is not clear whether a generic quality-of-life instrument can appropriately represent severe mental illness in an economic evaluation. This problem is particularly salient for resource-allocation decisions where policymakers compare...

The phototransduction cascade in Drosophila is a prototypical G-protein signaling pathway and many of its components have been well-studied. Early genetic screens identified many of the major proteins involved in this pathway and study over the...

The use of non-selective vasodilators for the purpose of pulmonary vasodilation has, to date, given mixed results; systemic hypotension has been the limiting factor. Lipid soluble gases (e.g. volatile anesthetics) are capable of inducing smooth...

The docking and fusion of cellular membranes plays an essential role in the secretory and endocytic pathways and in organelle inheritance. The homotypic fusion of vacuoles from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been used as a model system to...

Retinitis Pigmentosa is an inherited retinal degenerative disorder, initiated by point mutations on the rhodopsin gene. This thesis set forth to understand the mechanism of this pathogenesis, as well as to further improve our understanding of...

In the Firefighter Problem, a fire starts at a vertex of a graph, and in discrete time units, it spreads from burned vertices to their neighbors, unless they are protected by one of the f firefighters that are deployed every turn. Once burned or...